In the past, decisions frequently had to be made on minimal amounts of available data. Information traveled slowly, and what information was available could be considered by a human mind. Frequently, the greatest problem facing a decision maker was a paucity of information. Advances in information gathering and transmittal technologies have reversed this trend, making it easier to gather large amounts of information pertaining to a particular problem. A major task facing modern day decision makers is filtering and organizing the received information into a useful form.
While automated classification and decision making systems have become increasingly sophisticated, the human mind still outperforms automated systems on most real-world tasks. A limitation of human decision making, however, is the inability of human beings to simultaneously consider a large number of factors. Decision makers often find it difficult to mentally combine large amounts of evidence. Since the human tendency is to postpone risky decisions when data is incomplete, some decision makers may, when faced with overwhelming amounts of data, jump to conclusions, or refuse to consider a suitably diverse set of options. Accordingly, automated methods of generating and evaluating a plurality of courses of action for a given problem can greatly aid human decision makers by narrowing the scope of data to be considered.